Tuesday, August 6, 2013

RODEGHIER Tells You What You Need To Know: SSE Meeting 2103.

As you can see, the DVD making outfit finally got their work done and I received my order of three disks. I have a "brilliant" plan: NOT to write about all the talks on them. In fact, my main plan is to write about only three talks [other than my own, which I already bored you all with much earlier on the blog].

I'm going to write about Mark Rodeghier's talk in this entry, and skip the others you see listed above --- believe me when I say that this is a mercy on my part [more in brief on that later]. Later I'll try to give some accurate accounting of Roger Nelson's talk on the "EGGS" or the Global Consciousness Project, and Larry Dossey's talk on "distant effects" on bodies/objects. There are several other talks on both the Nelson and the Dossey tapes, and once I listen to them, I'll decide whether it's in our interests to write about any.

As a gesture of full disclosure and explanation of choice, I will say that I was preceded at the convention by two very good UFOlogist friends, Mark Rodeghier [right above] and Eddie Bullard [center]. Mark is laughing at Eddie for a reason that partly explains why I'm going to write about his talk and not Eddie's.

Whereas Mark is a tech-wizard, Eddie's on the opposite end of the spectrum [just as am I]. Eddie couldn't cope with the powerpoint technology and it caused constant hassles, sometimes hilarious --- you just couldn't help it --- during the talk. The germane thing about this was that it wasted a lot of time and truncated Eddie's talk seriously. Eddie had picked a tricky subject to get clearly across, and that time loss [disastrously] caused him to come across [due to lack of "balance time"] as a full-blown skeptic, which he is not. There's more to it than just that [I tried to talk him out of aspects of the thing beforehand] but that's sufficient to stand as my reason for not covering this, to me, fiasco.

As to the other talks... well, though I like John Alexander, I didn't get anything out of that particular presentation; Huspeni lectured us on "Scientific Method 101" as if veteran UFOlogists had been intellectually asleep all these years; and Hoyer gave a marginally intriguing but deductively cowardly presentation on geometry and the Face on Mars mountain. If you were hip, you'd thank me for not belaboring any of these.

But Rodeghier was different. As always, in my experience, he delivered the goods.

You've seen above that Mark's title was "Pattern Changes In The UFO Phenomenon". His point was that our experience of the phenomenon has been characterized by two great eras of witnessings. The first phase went from c. 1947 to about the transition era of 1980; and the second phase continues from then until today.

Phase One is what we all feel is UFOlogy. Or, if not that, at least "classic UFOlogy". It is disks and cigars and military-like overflights and landings, vehicle stoppings, and occupants in and around their technologies. Craft may be hovering or lightning fast. Radar and military chases are often involved. It is Keyhoe-ian and Blue Book, and for the most part CUFOS, UFOlogy. It seems generally to fit the ETH and since the ETH is an expected result of modern science's world model [i.e. they're "out there" and they're kinda like us, so sooner or later they'll meet up with us], this vision isn't really that uncomfortable in principle.

Phase One tends to cruise along with scattered sightings and then WOOM!! a "Wave". These waves usually take a week or two and are fairly localized as to a describable geography. This is what still imprints in our minds as what UFOs are all about.

But, in Mark's analysis, this situation would change. As he, Allen Hynek, and the rest of the CUFOS team sat in the office watching the flow of information pass by, Mark noticed a drop in cases, beginning in the late 1970s and bottoming out in the early 1980s. Early in that period, he had the intuition that something was changing in UFOlogy, and that perhaps we'd seen the last of business-as-usual. His colleagues told him he was nuts. But {he admits that this guess was pretty intuitive and lucky} he was right. The phenomenon of the old-style UFO wave was about to cease. At the convention, he said that in his analysis, the last traditional wave occurred in [mainly] Italy in 1978.

The first major "event" which caused head-shaking at CUFOS, and which signaled the change afoot, was the Hudson {NY} Valley Boomerang(s) outbreak. You can see the telling characteristics of this outbreak above. The thing involve very large objects based on triangular rather than radially symmetric aeronautical plans, moved VERY slow usually, and didn't avoid populations.

All manner of speculations arose as to whether these things had anything to do with core UFO phenomena at all [the prime alternative idea being US military projects] and back then at the transition this was particularly so. In fact Allen Hynek couldn't get most members of his CUFOS team to take the boomerangs seriously, even though HE did. They "just didn't fit".

The CUFOSians, and everyone else, didn't realize that something major was changing in UFOlogy.We were going into what Mark calls Phase Two, or the modern phase.

The graph of cases investigated by the French government group {GEPAN/ SEPRA/ GEIPAN} shows the drop-off in substantial cases fairly dramatically just at the "1980" transition. Hidden under this and several other investigative organizations' graphs is, what is for me, a much more interesting [and sinister?] set of graphs --- those for the counts of CE2s and old-fashioned CE3s [occupants with their crafts]. As the example TUFOIC [Tasmanian UFO Investigations Center, one of the solidest long-term public organizations in the world] graph shows, such potentially data-rich cases plummeted towards zero and remained there.

As the third post above says: 90% declines in all databases from responsible investigative organizations worldwide for these sorts of reports. For investigative UFOlogy, this has been disastrous.

No more of this......................................................................

While doing his analysis on all this, somewhat unhappy, story, Mark found one other thing, which I believe is completely new. Whereas before the transition the concentrations of UFO sightings, whether geographically very sharp or somewhat more diffuse, were all over the world in no seeming correlation as to location. Not now. Since the transition, these concentrations of reports appear synchronized over the globe --- i.e. if there's a reporting uptick here, then there's also a reporting uptick "there".

............flummoxes me. This phenomenon has always wanted to be very overt to individual witnesses, but cleverly covert to cultural impact and acceptance. Its first phase behavior brilliantly pulled this off, with a lot of help from the intelligence community. Now, however, the phenomenon has "taken away" the evidentiary cases, but seems to be willing to globally synchronize itself --- still short of smack-in-your-face overtness. It almost feels as if has accomplished its goal of a level of awareness in the cultures, and is now just dropping stones in the pond to maintain that status quo without risking messing it up.

Mark does not find that the behavior of numbers-reported of CE4s match the UFO phase two pattern. Whereas "regular UFO reports numbers" have never been correlated successfully with social factors, CE4s are wildly so. Make of that whatever you will. My own view is that, while I believe that there are a smallish number of on-board incidents which are investigatively strong, 99% of the claims are not. So I include CE4s in UFOlogy with conservative cautions. I can easily see how Mark finds no correlation with his Phase Two. [He, by the way, is much more positive towards there being "fairly" significant numbers of these things than I am]. Neither of us in in the orbit of Dave Jacobs or Budd Hopkins though.

Mark then asked the big question: why the transition?

A sociologist would jump to the conclusion that it was due to the people investigating. Such an argument could readily be made for CE4s, but this "old-fashioned UFOs" transition had nothing to do with the UFO core investigating community. "We" were more flummoxed by the change than anybody, and took forever to begin to see it even vaguely. "We" were all powered up for "regular" UFOlogy, both intellectually and technically. As Mark reminded us, the UFO community was readier for a scientific globally-cooperative approach in the 1970s and 1980s than anytime in history. The photo above is, by the way, a 1980s photo of Mark [right] with Vicente-Juan Ballester-Olmos, Spain's premier UFO researcher. We were ready in both imagery and expectation for something different than what happened.

The change doesn't seem to originate in witness expectations either. UFOs are still technological disks as far as people are concerned. Seeing flaps composed with extremely large triangular-based plans is not to be expected. Plus, every study of UFO witnesses [except for CE4 witnesses] shows nothing different about them and the average distribution of citizens would show. UFO incident reporters are "normal"... "lucky" maybe, but normal.

One could always say that maybe something more broadly societal has happened. Well, sure --- always does. But Mark, himself a sociologist by PhD training, simply challenged everyone to come up with something which actually seemed to be related to this change in UFOs.

What this has left Mark [and myself] with is: the transition has occurred because of the UFO agency itself. He listed three different categories within which one might begin thinking about this.

I'm not going to give any personal theories at this point. Both Mark and I think that it is likely that the change came due to some reason in the third or bottom category listed above. Both of us are suspicious of one troubling fact: the UFO phenomenon stopped giving the UFO investigating community heavily evidential {"physical"} cases, just as the UFO investigative community had powered up to take a bunch of such cases on. ................. and, again, make of that what you will.

Unfortunately, you folks will probably never hear Mark Rodeghier give a talk, or meet him personally --- Mark is no Media Circuit guy. But, if you get an opportunity: take it. Rare fellow; smart fellow; always delivers the goods.

I read this. There is almost no substantiated information here to work with. If this was a US case there should be US reporting, not just UK. There are no extended quotes from interviews, nor any hint of an investigation. While such a thing COULD have happened, given the paucity of "evidence" at the moment, it could just as easily not.

And, you're right: this doesn't belong as a remark in the Rodeghier thread.

Perhaps speculating as to what UFO's were up to during the historical "phase 1" might give some reasons for the transition around 1980. Presumably if UFO's were here, they came for a purpose. Let's face it, flying around in small saucers and making the odd individual contact might make sense during initial contact with a new, less advanced race, but once the initial scouting was completed, and they had collected all of the data they required and determined an action plan, then it would be time to progress to phase 2, to achieve their initial objectives. Looking at it another way, what would be the point of continuing with phase 1 indefinitely. The thirty or so years it persisted seems more than enough time to have developed a full understanding of humanity.

The above is all pure speculation on my part, of course, but in our history parallels abound when explorers from an advanced civilisation first make relatively discrete and somewhat friendly contact with a more backward culture. I hope the parallels don't go too far because the initial trade contacts in our history between different cultures were often followed by conquest and even annihilation of one by the other.

I know that the blog is too deep in entries to negotiate without a lot of random hunting, but hypotheses about what "they" were/are doing have been described in some depth elsewhere in the flow of this thing. This was especially true for my entries on the three types of super-advanced civilizations and what their goals might be with medium advanced worlds like Earth.

I wish that I had been at the conference to hear Mark's talk but hopefully I will hear it from him soon. I have also wondered why the change from the "disk" type object to the "triangular." Another possibility is that a second and different intelligence controls the triangular objects. The latter seems to be less aerodynamic than the former and have sometimes been reported to do crazy things such as flip on end and then move off or simply just "disappear." Nonetheless, we still do get occasional "disk" type reports that sound much like the cases of old---a disk that wobbles as it moves slowly through the sky.

Maybe the intelligence behind ufos have the ability to some how transform the appearance of their crafts or control how we perceive them. I've read some accounts where close encounter experiencers swear they're seeing a helicopter or a car and then it seems to 'morph' into a small disc.... Also orbs that take on solid metallic shapes.... A tiny plane in someone's backyard that morphed into a small triangle and took off.... An account where neighbors were looking at what they thought was a huge triangle object high in the sky and it split into small disc-shaped objects (part of the Chicago Illinois area sightings a decade or so ago,if my memory serves).

But, if these are actually two distinct kinds of UFOs it makes me think of what Phil Imbrogno had written in one of his later books ('Ultraterrestrial Contact'). Imbrogno had been tracking and investigating triangle ufos for almost three decades (starting with the NY Hudson Valley sightings which also bled over into western & central CT). He investigated some CT residents who claimed to experience what he considered to be a malevolent factor with the triangles - - people harassed/chased in their cars including the car and driver taken over and pulled to the side followed by a period of amnesia... poltergeist activity and noises in their homes... and alleged abductions by critters that resembled big insects (praying mantis looking) that were sadistic performing painful physical "tests" on the people. **There is a caveat emptor to this. Imbrogno was outed by a skeptic, Lance Moody, a couple of years ago for claiming he had a "sealed degree" from M.I.T. There's no such thing and he apparently fibbed. So, if Imbrogno would fib about his credentials, he would have the potential to fib or embelish on other subjects.

In my incomplete understanding, Imbrogno began somewhat reasonably, and, as happens too often with UFO-Lifers, has deviated further and further from the empirical path as time went by. I, rightly or wrongly, don't pay any attention to his "stuff" beyond the earlier Hudson Valley investigations.

As to not hearing Mark's talk: the NSA did a survey of UFO interested persons and decided that neither you, Robert, nor you, Brownie, had high enough clearance status to do so. You two, as they say, "cannot handle the Truth!!!"

{{{.........do I have to say for the Internet conspiracy crowd that I was joking?? }}}

One possibly critical factor in the reduction of Phase 1 UFO phenomena occurring around 1980 or so apparently not mentioned by Rodeghier could be the rapidly rising sophistication, acuity, and implementation of covert ground, air, and particularly space surveillance "early warning" technologies by the United States and Soviet military and intelligence communities beginning in the mid to late 1970's.

Advanced optical, radar, and other spy satellite technologies with sufficient digital "always on" discernment capabilities and world-wide coverage to potentially detect and record "Phase 1" type UFO phenomena only began to be fielded initially in the mid-70's, and didn't really become comprehensive and technically sophisticated enough to do so on a broad basis until the early to mid 1980's.

So perhaps one overlooked reason for the relative decline and near disappearance of the earlier, Phase 1 type UFO phenomenology had to do with human surveillance technology developing to the point of being able to more readily detect and potentially record that earlier sort or kind of UFO "display" in a definitive way, and as most objective UFO researchers have long understood, "trufos" seemingly avoid any overt or formal displays of the kind such surveillance technologies might have otherwise been capable of detecting and recording had the Phase 1 UFO typology continued.

In other words, our increasing capacity to detect and record such UFO phenomena may have been anticipated, and thus avoided.

The interesting coincidence to me us that 1977-1980 marks a major resurgence if popular culture interest in space and UFOs after Apollo, starting with Close Encounters and Star Wars and peaking with the Space Shuttle Columbia launch. For a few years almost everything on TV was space focused. By 1986 with Challenger the cultural space limelight was over; but if there's a cultural aspect to UFOs then 1977 feels like a strong pivot point somehow. But the triangle UFOs almost feel like they owe more to the geometry of Stealth plane technology than anything else.

Triangles have always been in the UFO flaps, but as minor components and small size. The post-1980 triangles, according to Mark's studies, are HUGE. This begs the question of whether they are relatives of the core technology of earlier years, or if they are the advanced stealth [or whatever] technology by ourselves.

Perhaps although the difference between phase 1 and 2 occur due to better human technology it would sound insufficient to explain it all considering the complexity of their plans, nevertheless.

For example, with highly advanced equipment available to extraterrestrials they might deceive our devices. Therefore I think, that even if our surveilance technology is part of the elements of the puzzle it looks like their final decision seems to be based on other causes or more important reasons than that. One idea would be social features or changes with our population, but who knows...